You launched an OpenClaw agent to handle a long task, stepped away, and when you check back—it's still "running." The token counter is climbing. The logs are growing. But nothing new is actually happening. Your agent is stuck.
The Problem: The Silent Loop
An infinite loop in an OpenClaw agent can look many ways:
- Tool call repetition: The agent keeps calling the same tool with the same arguments, expecting a different result that never comes.
- Retry spirals: A failed network call triggers a retry, which fails, which triggers another retry, indefinitely.
- Logic deadlock: Two conditional branches keep referring back to each other, and the agent can never settle on a next action.
The dangerous part isn't just wasted compute. It's that you often can't tell it's happening from the outside. The process is running, the logs are accumulating, everything looks normal—until you notice the timestamp on the last meaningful output was four hours ago.
The Solution: ClawBridge Live Thoughts + Emergency Stop
1. Spot the Loop in Real Time
Open ClawBridge on your phone and navigate to the Live Thoughts feed. In a healthy agent, each reasoning step should be distinct—new context, new decisions. In a loop, you'll see the same pattern repeating: the same tool being evaluated, the same reasoning fragment appearing with minor variations, the same error being encountered and "handled."
Recognizing a loop in the Live Thoughts feed takes seconds. Without it, you'd be guessing based on bland process-level output.
2. Terminate Immediately with Emergency Stop
Once you've confirmed the loop, go to Mission Control and hit Emergency Stop. This terminates the OpenClaw process instantly, without needing to SSH into your server or find a terminal. It doesn't wait for the agent to reach a safe state—it cuts the loop dead.
3. Restart Clean
After stopping, use Mission Control to restart the OpenClaw service. This gives you a clean slate: the stuck session is cleared, the LLM's message history is reset, and you can relaunch the task with a corrected prompt or a narrower scope.
How to Prevent Loops (With ClawBridge's Help)
- Watch the first few minutes of any new task type. Open Live Thoughts and keep an eye on the reasoning for the first 5–10 steps. If the pattern looks repetitive early, it's a signal.
- Check Token Economy after long tasks. A suspiciously high token count for a task that should have been simple is often a retroactive sign that a loop ran for a while.
A Realistic Scenario
You ask your agent to fetch and process 50 URLs from a list. One URL returns a 500 error. The agent, configured to retry on errors, retries it—indefinitely—because the retry logic doesn't have a hard limit. By the time you check in two hours later, it has made 400 identical requests to the same broken endpoint.
With ClawBridge, you'd have seen the repeated http_get tool call in Live Thoughts within minutes and hit Emergency Stop before the first 20 retries.
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Loops happen. What matters is how fast you catch them.